The Road Into Palo Duro Canyon

The Texas Panhandle is a long way past the last tall thing. The roads run ruler-straight through a country of grain elevators and windmills, and a person can drive for an hour and feel the world get simpler. The soil is dark and rich, the wheat is short, the cattle are dark, and the sky sits so close to the ground that it seems to be holding the flat land down. It is a working landscape, spare and open, and it does not hide much.

The flatness has order. Fields run to the fence lines. Ditches carry water from one roadside to the next. A grain elevator stands on the horizon long before the town that keeps it. Every mile of this country looks managed, measured, accounted for, and that is part of its beauty. Then, near the town of Canyon, the ground gives up its order. The earth splits open.

From the rim, the canyon is a sudden and complete fact. There is no valley approach, no softening slope. The red walls drop into the plain, layer after layer, and the bottom is far enough away that it looks like a separate climate. The edge looks out on both the flat, windy prairie above and the enclosed, still canyon below.

The road down

The park road has no hesitation about its business. It starts at the rim, tips forward, and goes down. The descent is made in switchbacks that lean against the canyon wall, and each turn brings a new angle on the strangeness of the drop. The line of the surface road rises behind the wheel like the wake of a boat. Highway sounds stop mattering. The only sounds are tires on asphalt, the creak of springs, and, with the windows down, air moving past juniper and rock.

The walls on the drive down are a geology lesson written in color. Red sandstone and mudstone form the long slopes; pale bands of gypsum cut across them like chalk marks; an upper layer of harder rock holds the canyon open at a measure that resembles a cap. The same layers that look so flat from above are turned on edge here, and a person can see thousands of years in the angle of a single slope.

Near the bottom, the road crosses the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. It is an unassuming little waterway most of the year, clear and shallow, moving over a bed of red sand. Cottonwoods stand close along it, their leaves ticking in the wind. After heavy rain the river becomes wider and wilder, and the crossing sometimes floods and the road waits.

The floor

The floor of Palo Duro is wide and flat enough to feel like the prairie that was left behind, except for the walls. They rise on every side in broken columns, mesas, and deep arroyos. The scale of the space is difficult to take in all at once. A short walk from the road reveals a quiet amphitheater of stone.

The most famous formation in the canyon stands on the far side of the floor. The Lighthouse is a tall pillar of red rock with a heavier block on top, shaped by wind and water in a way that seems deliberate. The trail to it goes through open ground, among cactus and low brush, over dry washes and around the skirts of smaller mesas. The last rise brings it into view, and it is exactly what a lighthouse should be: a landmark that makes the empty space around it feel found.

Down here, the light follows its own schedule. The sun crosses the lip of the canyon and moves down the wall in stages. Shadows travel across the floor in slow spans, and the red rock goes from pale brick to deep rust to a color with no name. The silence is not total. Water sounds, wind sounds, the tick of dry grass. But it is a different silence from the open plains, because it is enclosed. The canyon holds it, the way a cupped hand holds a drink.

There are places on the floor that feel older than the state, older than the country. The main impression is of time, set on a different scale. A red cliff does not hurry.

The climb back

Returning to the rim is the other half of the trip. The road goes back up the way it came, but it is not the same road. The switchbacks that felt narrow going down feel steeper going up, and the canyon widens behind the vehicle with every turn. What was a wall up close becomes a ridgeline, then a pattern of colored bands, then a distant scar. By the last turn, the canyon has folded itself back into the flat country, and the high plains are the whole world again.

At the top, the wind is moving the same way it was before. The wheat, the fields, the fences, the endless horizon. After the climb, from the rim, there is only flatness in every direction. The canyon is down there, still, complete, holding its own weather. It is a place that the Panhandle keeps to itself, and the road down is a way of earning it.

Palo Duro Canyon State Park

Photos: Larry D. Moore (CC BY 4.0); Sefor4 (CC BY-SA 3.0)